Adjacent Constellations

A violence exiting is still a violence.
After the genocide, the genocide.

The river that would have carved
a different earth, the river
a carved earth summoned.

But since the flood,
the magnificent flood,
your indifference exiting.

Is this love? Could be love.
You haven’t once
wished for this love

to end, and I have
more than once.

That it will end
without your wishing.
You promised

you will keep your eyes on the fire.
You can’t. Your eyes
are on fire. And I’m no help.

Carousel

To worship their thumb’s desire.
What imprints me keeps me under.
I come up for air. I want them gone.

Last week I saw a lifeless monarch
butterfly in my garden, barely an hour
after her heart gave out.
She was perfect. Ancient

Egyptian embalmers
had just released her
in a spaceship mask
to the museum of my eyes.

Whatever failed her, migration
or procreation, wasn’t wicked to her.

I left her for the ants.

Each Burden a Song 

Today I travel away from you.
For two weeks I hope to make three,
not a word of yours will reach me,
and how can they not?
I will be with my love. Unafraid
of my blindness in your night. Water for water
I am the barbarian of the new time,
here to bring you down,
and your only consolation may be that
I’d have chosen a different path
were it not for the randomness of markers.
My sea, my mountain, my tongue, my hymn.
I will be with my love.
My fingertips prayers to her back
as she faces a wall and shields me from it.
She, my only path to no path forward with her.
Is there a wandering lovelier? The wall
opens to a door, the door to another door,
so we exit through the window.
A pair of homing pigeons releases us
without message. In the new land,
our old land an old hand.
She turns to face me,
scratches my shoulder
with her teeth and laughs.